In his book, The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman argues that shame is a crucial element of the civilizing process. He maintains that the printing press encouraged the development of a heightened sense of shame.

The reading of books demands quite a victory over our nature. To read a book you have to subordinate your body to your mind. You have to develop skills of self-restraint, suspension of criticism and delayed gratification. To learn to read children must learn to keep their bodies still and master the art of concentration and logical thought. They have to learn to gain control over their impulses. The psychology of book-learning has a powerful effect in teaching us the need to control and master our nature. The training of the mind and body in literacy had its social analogue in the inculcation of manners.

[Although Postman does not do so, one could reference the work of Walter Ong here. Ong has observed the effect of the printed word upon conscience in his work Orality and Literacy. The printed word encourages increasingly deeper levels of introspection and interiorization of conscience.]

Postman argues that shame and manners depend on the existence of secrets for much of their power. In a society that cannot keep secrets ‘shame cannot exert any influence as a means of social control or role differentiation.’

The printing press provided the means by which children could be kept out of the world of adults. During the Middle Ages children and adults inhabited the same social and intellectual world, the local and immediate world. Following the invention of the printing press it was increasingly the case that one had to learn how to read to have access to the world of adulthood with its secrets. One had to earn adulthood in a way that one never had to before.

The printing press facilitated a clear distinction between the symbolic world of childhood and the symbolic world of adulthood. It provided structures in which secrets could be kept and, consequently, gave greater power to shame within society. In so doing it led to the creation of the modern ideas of both adulthood and childhood. As Postman observes: ‘Almost all of the characteristics we associate with adulthood are those that are (and were) either generated or amplified by the requirements of a fully literate culture.’

Children were ‘immersed in a world of secrets’, regulated by parents and other adults. These secrets could be hidden from children in the symbolic world of adulthood, a world to which children would only have access through the rigorous process of learning how to read, with its associated development of character and sense of shame.

These secrets led to a heightened sense of curiosity and were only gradually made known to children as their characters developed and they grew in self-restraint and sense of appropriate shame. It gave parents a greater degree of authority as those who preserved secrets and progressively revealed them to children.

Aspects of our world that would traumatize young children could be hidden from them. The world of childhood could be protected from knowledge that might wound it. Children could be shielded from the knowledge of the nature of the sex and violence of society until such a time as they were psychologically equipped to deal with it.

Following the advent of television — the total disclosure medium — such secret-keeping is no longer possible in the same way. No training of character, mind and imagination comparable to that required to learn how to operate well in the world of the printed press is required in order to watch television. There is no code to ‘crack’. There are few if any prerequisites. There are no skills to learn. You don’t become a better television-watcher over time.

Postman claims that the distinction between adulthood and childhood created by the printing press is rapidly being eroded. As secrets are lost, so is childhood curiosity and adult authority. Children develop adult attitudes of cynicism and indifference. There is also a loss of the sense of wonder that accompanies childhood in a world of secrets. No longer do children receive their knowledge of society’s secrets through the training received in the school and family. The secrets of society are revealed to them by the television.

Although Postman’s book is over twenty years old, in many respects it is even more relevant than it was when it was first written. Postman’s argument is flawed in certain respects, the scope of his case is rather limited and his book reads much as a side-thesis to Amusing Ourselves to Death, but I would still strongly recommend it to anyone interested in this subject in any way.